Women`s Touch

From Outskirts To Center Stage In London Season

September 28, 1986|By Matthew Wolf.

In the new London theater season, the women definitely dominate. In contemporary works and the classics, on the commercial West End and in the subsidized sector, the actresses are taking center stage to often stirring

--and stunning--results.

At 50, Glenda Jackson, a two-time Oscar winner, now takes on fewer film assignments, preferring instead to tackle daunting stage parts that would vanquish many a less resolute performer. At present, she is at the peak of her talent in the Lyric/Hammersmith theater`s revival of Federico Garcia Lorca`s

``The House of Bernarda Alba,`` the kind of rarely seen classic that so often enlivens London theatergoing.

First performed in Buenos Aires in 1945, ``Bernarda Alba`` was written by the Spanish playwright shortly before his execution at age 38 a half-century ago in the Spanish Civil War.

In this and the two other plays in his trilogy of female frustration,

``Blood Wedding` and ``Yerma,`` Lorca writes about women with a peculiar double perspective. In his torpid landscape, women are victimized by the offstage tyranny of men, but they`re also victimized by their sudden proximity to one another--or by a sterile, barren household that fears sex and loathes sensuality.

Jackson`s Bernarda, Lorca`s embodiment of the incipient fascism that would soon crush his country, throws an annihilating cloak over her all-female household: her five repressed and sparring daughters; her housekeeper Poncia

(Joan Plowright, and splendid); her maid; and her mother, Maria Josefa (the veteran Patricia Hayes). By play`s end, following a second death in her family to follow the recent loss of her husband, Bernardo is left staring granite-faced at a ``sea of mourning`` in which she will drown.

Few actresses have made a similar career out of an emblazoned iciness. At times, this implacability has worked against Jackson, becoming a cliched emotional stance. But in ``Bernarda Alba`` the actress does thorough service to a role. Letting the one word ``now`` scrape across her throat at the climax of a would-be murder, she locates the intersection of ghoulishness and glee that blackens an ever-darkening play.

Madness hovers pregnantly over another woman--Julia McKenzie`s tormented Susan--in Alan Ayckbourn`s new play ``Woman in Mind,`` at the Vaudeville.

Astonishingly, this marks the 32d play by the 47-year-old Ayckbourn, and although it`s structurally fresh, the theme is an Ayckbourn constant: the small horrors and larger emotional tolls of bourgeois British domesticity.

That house-bound hell is driving Susan to literal distraction. Trapped with a fastidious parishioner of a husband and an uncommunicative son, Susan invents in her mind a nattily dressed, tennis-playing, generously emotive family to redeem the reality of her daily drear.

Unable to balance fantasy and reality, she finally lets the former win out; but as her imbalance mounts, so, too, does her author`s. He loses the ferocity behind the fantasy that would make the play as disturbing as it wants and needs to be.

The productioon requires more bite than Ayckbourn, as director, provides. McKenzie is often more suggestive than the play that contains her. But all credit is due Ayckbourn for having the good sense to give this chance to an actress better known in London for musical roles in ``Guys and Dolls,`` ``On the Twentieth Century`` and ``Side by Side by Sondheim.``

The emotionally wide-ranging and self-immolating Susan is something else again. It requires her to be on-stage throughout, speaking often in the gibberish of the unhinged, and juggling dual families and lives as she totters on the edge. McKenzie commands sympathy in what could have been a self-pitying whine, even as she suggests--intriguingly--that Susan is not entirely blameless in her madness.

At once emotional predator and prey, she`s the middle-class counterpart to the patrician Susan Traherne in David Hare`s ``Plenty,`` a woman embedded in a society in which she finds no rest.

There`s scant peace available, either, for the anxious women at the center of ``The Bay at Nice,`` the new work by Hare at the National Theater as part of a double-bill alongside his play ``Wrecked Eggs.``

``Bay`` pits Irene Worth and Zoe Wanamaker as mother and daughter at odds with one another in Leningrad in 1956.

The date is no accident. That year saw the Soviet invasion of Budapest and the reactive last-ditch effort to oust Communism from Hungary. The conflict between political principle and personal volition is personified in Worth`s Valentine, a former student of the artist Matisse, called in to authenticate a painting at an unnamed museum.

As the mother ruminates on the ``wayward`` past of which she is a product, daughter Sophie attempts to rectify her own wayward present. She wants a divorce from her unseen party-member husband so that she can marry the older and unambitious Peter (Philip Locke). She must fight the crushing weight of a regime that her mother, in contradictory ways, embraces.

The play itself is livelier conceptually than dramatically. Its pronouncements--``I know what life is and what it cannot be,`` ``Love is pain,`` etc.--are hued with the color purple.

But the Nebraska-born Worth rivets the stage. In a wordless final scene out of an Antonioni film, she unveils the canvas she has kept covered throughout the play. Her reaction--a mixture of shock, ecstasy and loss--has the same illuminating strength as the art she so reveres.